Alexander T. Rodack began the day as any ordinary graduate student: tired, depressed, and wondering when, if ever, it will end? Well Alex, today is that day.
Welcome to having a doctorate from the College of Optical Sciences! I’m sure everyone who attended your dissertation defense thoroughly enjoyed your talk. And for those that weren’t present, I hope you post the recording somewhere for them to be amazed by the fruits of your labor (if they can understand what you’ve done, of course).
School’s out! Now go on and get to work at Raytheon!
Last Friday our shipping contractor (or at least our shipping contractor’s contractor) collected MagAO-X.
Grad students are for pushing heavy thingsHurry up and waitFork yeahMySpace anglesEnd of the beginning
After it was loaded, Dr. Males said “I’m going home to not think about MagAO-X,” as is tradition.
MagAO-X now travels by ground to Miami, then by air to Santiago, then by ground again to the Las Campanas Observatory. I will follow its progress like last time.
Song of the Day
“Once More For The Ocean” by Slothrust
Tracking Tucson to Miami
Date
Time
Location
Time elapsed
Distance
Speed
2022-03-04
10:30 MST
Tucson, AZ
Truck arrives
—
11:38 MST
Tucson, AZ
MagAO-X completely loaded on truck, departs from campus
—
2022-03-05
13:08 MST
Tucson, AZ
Shipment departs logistics center
—
20:21 CST
El Paso, TX
Arrives at intermediate logistics center
1d 6h
318 mi
11 mph
2022-03-06
—
—
2022-03-07
07:02 CST
El Paso, TX
Back on the road
10:53 CST
Wickett, TX
Arrives at intermediate logistics center
2d 21h
559 mi
8 mph
11:10 CST
Wickett, TX
Back on the road
13:49 CST
(Abilene, TX)
"Exempted from Service - SERVICE EXEMPTION DUE TO WEATHER" (What weather? A sudden storm of “delay”?)
Looks like we might actually be doing this … if World War 3 doesn’t break out first. Please enjoy this video of today’s activities from clips taken by me and Alex Hedglen.
Since rights-holders can be so mean about these things, no audio track is included. However, I recommend playing the song of the day at the same time to get the full effect.
With cautious optimism, we are approaching the second ever MagAO-X ship date. It’s hard to believe that it has been 2.5 years since we last did this! The system has grown in complexity in the interim, gaining a spectrograph named VIS-X (P.I. Sebastiaan Haffert) as well as many new controllable degrees of freedom. (Always need more of those.)
We haven’t been sitting on our thumbs for the past two years. Our instrument has been moonlighting as a testbed for the phasing of the Giant Magellan Telescope, among other things. I’ll have to update our publications page in my copious free time.
Yesterday was the last day of lab operation of the instrument and the beginning of packing. I got some final tests of the computer system finished, the optics were covered for shipment, the glycol was purged from the cooling system, and we de-cabled the instrument from its electronics rack (which is traveling in its own crate).
Pictured (left to right): Who knows? They’re all wearing too many protective layers to be identified.Not only do freezer bags protect the optics from dust, they also work for food storage! Wow!
Another entry for my other blog, “Dr. Males Pointing At Things”.
This delicate work involved many layers of protective equipment: masks, currently a requirement for existing in the world; bootie shoe covers, a requirement for entering the lab; hairnets and gowns, a requirement for entering the cleanroom tent; and electrostatic discharge protection, a requirement for handling the delicate MEMS deformable mirror cabling.
Our electronics rack has been growing new cables and hoses and equipment for 2.5 years without its doors and side panels in place. So, when we tried to put those on, we found they didn’t fit. Much like me after a period of pandemic isolation, its clothes didn’t fit right any more.
Rather than buying it a new outfit, we made some alterations. We sculpted the styrofoam insulation, adding pockets where needed. (Everyone loves clothes with pockets.)
Pictured: Dr. Jared Males and Dr. Sebastiaan Haffert sculpting the styrofoam. (The assistance of dissertated graduate student Jennifer Lumbres, arts and crafts lead of the 2019B run, was sorely missed.)
This time, fortunately, the metal tape we used did not taste blood.
By this time next week, we may still need to hedge our predictions for the 2022A run… but we’ll know for certain whether MagAO-X itself is going to Chile!
Song of the Day
Your song of the day is “Future Starts Slow” by The Kills.
The city of Tucson was made brighter today with the passing of Jhen’s PhD defense and a much-deserved level up. A huge round of applause for Dr. Lumbres!
Jhen’s talk was very comprehensive regarding her various projects she’s taken on during her time here at UArizona. If you’re like me, you learned a lot about the intricacies of Fresnel propagation and the problems that laser guide stars can solve. It was pretty surreal to me being that the last time I attended one of her talks was at the 2020 OpSci Winter School event when I was but a mere crouton in the world of optics and astronomy.
Moving forward, she’ll be relocating to sunny Los Angeles to work for Northrop-Grumman as an optical engineer and resident chocolatier early next year.
Salamat, Jhen! That’s a fancy Tagalog term that roughly translates to “may your hunts be fruitful and your arrows fly swift.” Or something like that. On second thought I think it just means thanks. We’ll miss you! (and your treats..!)
